Danger, Will Robinson Wannabe…
by Jarrod Campbell
Who is this striking person? I must have wondered, seeing the cute blond kid in action on TV, black and white, complete with robot and sneering, older, queer-coded male forever in the periphery. An obsession with being obsessed was born. For days, nothing else mattered. This incident also marked my debut of falling dangerously hard for unobtainable guys. Guys who graced the small screen in my living room. Guys who populated the pages of Sears catalogs. Guys who were straight. This one existed so far out of my league, he lived in outer space. I remained lost on Earth back then when I was six years old and had no comprehension of how television worked at all.
Around this age, I also fixated on a boy named Pete and his cartoon dragon to the point of exhaustion. He was the first to represent what I wanted to be since I already looked a bit like him. Enough to inspire family members to call me Pete as a nickname. The preoccupation existed because I thought the actor cute. My will to resist blonds deteriorated then and there, making my attraction to Will Robinson even easier.
At that age, I too had very blond hair. I could see me in the space boy and the space boy in me. I liked his look, which meant I could like my looks, if only I looked more like him than I did myself. Another first for me here: the desire to lose myself by taking on the features of someone else. How beautiful I could be if I pretended a haircut or style of dress gave me even imaginary closeness to someone I found attractive.
One day, to my great delight, mom announced haircut time. With violent insistence, I demanded my hair look like the space boy’s or else. The basic cut and style came from a bygone era but still topped the heads of young boys everywhere. Whether or not my new hairdo looked like my crush’s, I couldn’t say. I relied on the unified confirmation of my mom and the woman barber. All I needed. For the rest of the night, I was over the moon in his ecstatic company. And free to believe myself worthy of anyone’s desire because, in my mind, I resembled exactly who I desired.
The happiness sank from the crown of my freshly coiffed head down into my swelling heart. Such joy in feeling like I looked like someone I thought so appealing. So handsome and curious a young man, that Will Robinson. Me too, by proxy.
The rapture of feeling like I resembled my space boy became too much for my overflowing heart, moving the rich blood to a new ecstasy felt in spirit, just below the waist. Then in rising flesh made red with blushing blood on a high simmer. The novelty of that event confused me for years until I better understood the physics of desire.
The only person able to tell me anything that mattered after the haircut was the woman who paid for it, my mom. She told me I had to go to bed. With reluctance, I did. How painful to have been given everything only to then have it taken away — shot from the sky to crash woeful back on Earth. Feeling myself like that was new and I relished the sensation. I never wanted it to end and feared going to sleep held the power to steal these memories and ruin days’ worth of effort needed to inspire the most insignificant amount of hope.
Slumber wanted nothing to do with me that night. I offered heart-felt thanks. Of course I’d trade a good night’s sleep for the sake of suspecting myself beautiful. Self-worth never came easy, so I clung to any crumb of possibility. The reality: I feared sleeping would mess up my hair and I’d lose connection to my space boy crush.
Funny, or concerning, to see the early stirrings of stereotypical queer neurosis.
The next morning, who could say if my hair still looked like his. All outside sources said yes, even a few kids at school. So far, so good. Until my hair grew out, right along with my concern about whether or not I still resembled the space boy. I knew that no matter what he’d always have a special place in my heart for the effect he had on me and my budding sensibilities. But before long, my roaming heart reached out for some other boy I thought held the same power to affect me with similar shocks to the system. After all, the replacement lived on earth. Easier access. Just like with Will Robinson, I copied an aspect of this new infatuation. This time I affected a new manner of speech and a sturdier stride. To make me feel closer to him. Desired by him. Normal like him. That person’s name or what he looked like, I have no idea.
About the author:
Jarrod Campbell is a writer living in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. His work has appeared online and in print with Heavy Feather Review, Northwest Review, Modern Literature, Wicked Gay Ways, and others. A collection of short stories, The Reason I’m Here, (Stalking Horse Press, June 2023), was listed as an anticipated read the month of its release by Lambda Literary.